Our notion of God today -- all-powerful, invisible, and omnipresent --
is not the same as the God of the Hebrew Bible. So who is this "God of Old?" And what is His place in the modern spiritual world?
James Kugel is renowned for his investigations into the history of the biblical era, a time beginning more than three thousand years ago, when the Bible's earliest parts first took shape. With The God of Old, Kugel goes even deeper, attempting to enter the pages of the Old Testament and see God as the Israelites first encountered him.
The God of Old appeared to people unexpectedly; He was not sought out. Often He was not even recognized, at first mistaken for an ordinary human being. The realm of the divine was not as it is today -- a spiritual dimension set off from the material world. The spiritual and the material overlapped, and the realm of the dead was a real domain just beyond the world of the living. Ordinary reality was in constant danger of sliding into something else, something stark but oddly familiar. And God was always standing just behind the curtain of the everyday world.
In this groundbreaking study, Kugel suggests that this alternative spirituality is not simply an archaic relic, replaced by a "better" understanding. Kugel's picture of the God of Old has much to tell us about God's very nature, and about the encounter between Him and human beings in today's world.
A book to treasure side by side with the Bible, The God of Old is sure to engage scholars and spiritual seekers alike for years to come.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
To call to a God you know can be here:
Kugel is one of the world's foremost Bible scholars. In this work he makes an effort to understand what he calls , "The God of Old". He distinguishes between the conception of God created in the Babylonian Exile in which God is omnipotent and omniscient. With this he contrasts the "God of Old" Who is in a sense a more limited God appearing at certain times and not appearing at others.
As Kugel sees it the world in which the Bible was created did not have a separate spiritual and material realm. The... more info
stale:
The author made entirely too many assumptions for the average reader. I found his style dry.
Insightful, contemplative, well-written:
Few people can write as well as Kugel. In discussing the starkness of Psalm 90, Kugel compares the summation of one's life to a painting: "This canvas is the only thing of our existence that endures. To be sure, it does not endure in any tangible way, since nothing tangible endures in any case. [...] But it is no less real for being intangible--that is the essence of the stark world--in fact, it is only thanks to its intangibility that it does endure, and it is the only thing that matters. [...] when... more info
interesting read:
I can recall the experience of afternoon Hebrew school and the small group of us being urged to pontificate on the nature of God - we had several choices, namely, the Watchmaker, the Unmoving Mover, the Captain of a large ship, etc. My utter disappointment in myself at not knowing the correct answer is of course part of this lucid memory. I still retain a certain faith in the nature of right answers but now I appreciate how these right answers can vary, dependent on the multiple realities inherent in... more info
